The poor novice thought that Upasampada opened the door upon a life in which a tranquil and scholarly mounting to perfection, untroubled by a single jarring incident from the outer world, was a natural sequence. Those high beings, advancing with rapid paces toward Nirvâna—surely their hearts and minds knew nothing of the battles, the uprisings of self, the human desires and yearnings that he was forever struggling against! Perhaps, indeed, the monks of the Samgha knew no such troubles as these. Their difficulties were usually of a more ignoble kind. As in the monasteries of another faith, in the far west, the Buddhist Viharas, even during their pathetic decadence, were too often seething hot-beds of rivalry and inward strife, thinly whitewashed with an outer coat of obedience to precept and renunciation of the fivefold clinging to the world. In the Vihara, a man desirous of attaining to Nirvâna had not only his own weakness to conquer, his own nature to strengthen; but he had before him the long battle of rivalry with those who, for every step he advanced, strove to make him take two backward. The result was, that the Samgha became a place of inner plots and counter-plots, intrigues worthy of a royal court, stealthy meetings and conversings of one faction or another, where obstacles innumerable were devised for any man who desired to mount to a higher and holier estate. Of all the men in the Vihara of Truth, probably no one had received more of the miserable stabs of envy and jealousy than had Hushka, the honey-throated. Greatly beloved—by more than Oman—he was also passionately hated. It was now twenty years since his Upasampada ordination; and in all that time he had known scarcely an hour when he was not enduring the malicious jealousy of a rival. For a long time now his opposing faction had been led by Mahapra, a man who had passed his Upasampada a year earlier than Hushka, and who had caused him more and bitterer disappointments and humiliations than any dozen of his other enemies. And there were those of his friends who whispered that, had Mahapra been out of the way, it had not been Sugata who stood now an Arahat, at the head of the Samgha. Never came there a Pavarana, scarcely even an Uposatha day, that Hushka was not made to taste the venom of his enemy; and there was surely no heart-sickness that he had not endured. He had suffered as few of his companions could suffer; for his nature was delicately organized, and he was sensible to the most refined stings of misery. With all this, Mahapra himself rarely caught a glimpse of the wounds he inflicted; for Hushka had the power of concealment, and the wisdom never to burden any one with a recital of his own unhappiness. It was thus that, to an outsider, his life could scarcely seem other than beautiful.